A Joyless Experiment

 A New York Times article yesterday reminded me that one of the various schemes Kash Patel has proposed over the years—in order to punish the Justice Department for maintaining its political independence vis-a-vis Trump—is to hollow out the FBI building and turn it into a "museum of the 'deep state'." Obviously, this is absurd. But I had to think for a minute about why it struck me too as so distinctly totalitarian and creepy. Why did it all feel so eerily familiar? 

Then I remembered: of course! That scene in Eimi! In E.E. Cummings's experimental modernist travelogue of that title—which takes its author through the bowels of the 1930s Soviet Union in a manner analogous to Dante's tour of hell—Cummings recounts one episode in which he stops by the famous cathedral in Moscow. The church building has survived into the new regime, you see; but it has been repurposed. It now serves as an "anti-religious museum" to propagandize against the old faith. 

It is of course ironic that the American Republican Party is taking a leaf from the book of Bolshevik anti-Christian crusaders. But also, not so surprising. The MAGA movement fancies itself the protagonist in a "revolution." And it appears to be part of the totalitarian revolutionary psyche to want to turn the former headquarters of the defeated faith into a museum dedicated to propagandizing against itself. In this case—the former faith being the rule of law; and the new faith being the Trump personality cult. 

Cummings, by the way, was not particularly impressed or swayed by the museum—or by anything else he saw in the USSR. Throughout the book, he is surrounded by American fellow travelers who try to persuade him that there is no true repression in the Soviet Union—whether of religion or of anything else. But as they say so, he notes—they nearly always cast anxious glances around the room. And all try to shush him as soon as a suspected member of the "Gee Pee Yoo" enters the room. 

What Cummings ultimately concludes from his far-from-starry-eyed journey through the Worker's State is that—no matter what the fellow travelers say about growing pains and breaking eggs to make omelettes—the whole totalitarian enterprise is really nothing more than a "joyless experiment in force and fear." And that is all this MAGA "revolution" is likely to be as well. (It is no coincidence, surely, that some of the most prominent MAGA propagandists also seem to be enamored of Moscow.)

Like the fellow travelers of yore, the Kash Patels of the world may try to convince themselves they are having a good time. They may laugh at the idea of turning the FBI headquarters into a "museum of the 'deep state,'" just as the Bolsheviks no doubt thought it was a good joke to turn Saint Basil's Cathedral into an anti-religious museum. But ultimately, the grin is forced. It's dogged by the footsteps of the secret policeman of the GPU—or of the DOJ remade in Trump's image—behind it. 

This MAGA revolution, like all revolutions founded in totalitarianism and autocracy, is bound to prove a "joyless experiment" in the end.